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For some reason, there's a persistent subset of people – both faculty and staff – who can't raise one issue without referencing ten more. Worse, they aren't raised in the spirit of “this connects to that,” but in a spirit of “and ANOTHER thing...” I call it the litany.

... isn't technically about sustainability. It's about food. Or, more technically, our agricultural system. It's here. You should go read it and then come back. I'll wait.
OK, so what did you think?
My first impression was that the writer (Paul Roberts) got it right on a number of fronts. Among them:

This article from the Chronicle, about spousal hiring, and this one from IHE, about administrative searches in a recession, are worth reading together. They're both about the real-world friction that gets in the way of hiring the best people for a given job.

There must be a newly-minted Ph.D. out there, diss unpublishable, who’d like to write a book for a general audience on the visual rhetoric of wonder cabinets. Please do, so I won’t have to devote the next two years of my life to the subject. All I ask is thanks in the acknowledgments.

An alert reader sent me the link to this article from the Springfield (Mass.) Republican. Apparently, the University of Massachusetts is sending out layoff notices to 60 faculty now, just in case it needs to actually go through with layoffs this Fall. If the stimulus package delivers enough, it will call some fraction of the 60 back.

We live in a great neighborhood where many people decorate their homes for Christmas with fancy lights that draw people from other neighborhoods to admire them. When my daughter was a very little girl, she used to look with awe at the lights as we drove around the neighborhood, pointing to particularly beautiful displays and saying, in her eighteen-month-old voice, “more.” She wanted to see more.

Having dissed George Will, a conservative darling of the ostensibly liberal media, I want to balance the scales by dissing George Monbiot who's truly on the left. In general, I enjoy reading Monbiot. He's no Ida Tarbell but, with time, he might turn into Izzy Stone.

I have vague memories of reading Seventeen magazine upstairs in my attic bedroom, alone and sequestered from my parents. Even though I was already enthralled with more ‘serious’ literature, I was never able to completely shun the cultural images that play on a young girl’s darker desires to be thin, mysterious and desirable. Brains are better than beauty, right?

I’m the best teacher who ever lived. Anyway I think that’s what the Provost said in the letter she sent to congratulate me for winning the Campus Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. I’m honored most by the fact that my former and present students generated and supported my nomination, and that I’ll be presented at a ceremony with a sack of money, which I hear will buy things.